disco

"My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody calls me Giorgio."

"Once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and of music being "correct," you can do whatever you want. So, nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do."

"The Germans told me "We're going to conquer the world!" and I don't regret working with a German record company at all, because for my career it was great, but they wanted to control me, direct me and restrict me. They wanted absolute discipline and that's not the life for me, so after a few years of that I wanted out."

"In Italy I'm big because they're all so sex-obsessed. In Germany I succeeded because they've been waiting for someone like Marlene Dietrich to come along ever since the war. I played on their need for a drunken, nightclubbing vamp. And I've won the gays, who are crucial because they have all the best discos, entirely because of the extraordinary legends about me."

"I knew nothing when I first met him. He taught me to see things through his eyes. Dalí was my teacher. He let me use his brushes, his paint and his canvas, so that I could play around while he was painting for hours and hours in the same studio. Surrealism was a good school for me. Listening to Dalí talk was better than going to any art school."

"I'd grown up thinking I was ugly, ugly, ugly. I was much too tall, I was much too skinny, I was flat-chested, I had my mother's Asian eyes and cheekbones so I looked foreign compared to all my girlfriends, my mouth was too big and my teeth were too big so I never smiled. And then Françoise Hardy had her breakthrough in France and everything suddenly changed. Before her you were supposed to look like Brigitte Bardot, blonde, curvy and busty. But I was about twenty when people started telling me "You know what, you look a little like Françoise Hardy, you could be a model" and then out of the blue this famous woman, the great Catherine Harlé turns up. By sheer accident she happened to see me in the street in Paris and asked me if I wanted to be a fashion model and I thought she was joking! And she said "No, no, no, you're exactly the type of girl we're looking for" and all of a sudden all of these flaws, all the things I'd been so ashamed of, became my greatest assets. By sheer accident, as most things in my career."

"I hate to spread rumours: but what else can one do with them?"

"Compilations, to me, are embarrassing. To bring out a compilation, to me, is to say, "Look. I've got no new material so please buy this. I need money to pay the rent." I think it's very embarrassing. And that is very annoying because the record company owns all those titles and they don't ask me for my advice. They just decide to release "the best of" compilations and they put out a lot of very bad quality music. There are a couple of good titles but the rest are just tracks to fill out the album. And they know very well that they can't rely on me promoting them because I won't promote such records."

"People only know me as a celebrity and don't realize how much more important art is to me than makeup and set costumes. Show business pays the rent, but painting is my only true passion, so I define myself as a painter who works in show business. Art is a kind of therapy to me, thanks to which I can interpret my feelings. An empty canvas before my eyes is synonymous with the absolute freedom of expression."

"I don't care when I was born, if I'm 50, 60 or 70. It's important that I am alive."

"Work it harder, make it better Do it faster, makes us stronger More than ever, hour after hour Work is never over"

"Sampling the traditional way gets frustrating fast: bad tuning, rigid tempos, weird textures that don’t bend. So we started recording our own source material — built for flexibility. It saves us 900 hours digging through crates. The downside? No more surprises. No more accidents. That spark of stumbling on a forgotten gem … gone. Daft Punk were the kings of that. They could turn half a second of groove into a global anthem."

"Nineteen years on, every single aspect of Discovery has been pilfered time and time again, from the glossy production style to the sound of the drums. Every vocal in pop has that electronic effect on it, which I now know is called Auto-Tune. Daft Punk were incredibly prescient: play Discovery today and it sounds utterly contemporary."

"It's not right, it's not true, it's not right It's not how we used to do"

"If you lose your way tonight That's how you know the magic's right"

"Familiar faces I've never seen Living the gold and the silver dream Making me feel like I'm seventeen And it's crystal clear that I don't ever want it to end"

"Remember, love's our only mission This is a journey of the soul"

"Like the legend of the phoenix All ends with beginnings What keeps the planet spinnin' The force from the beginnin' We've come too far To give up who we are So let's raise the bar And our cups to the stars She's up all night 'til the sun I'm up all night to get some She's up all night for good fun I'm up all night to get lucky"

"Home, hold on, if love is the answer, you're home."

"I know you don't get a chance to take a break this often I know your life is speedin' and it isn't stoppin' Here, take my shirt and just go ahead and wipe up all the Sweat, sweat, sweat"

"He runs his scissors at the seam in the wall He cannot break it down or else he would fall One thousand lonely stars hiding in the cold Take it, oh, I don't wanna sing anymore"

"There are so many things that I don't understand There's a world within me that I cannot explain Many rooms to explore, but the doors look the same I am lost, I can't even remember my name"

"Once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and of music being "correct," you can do whatever you want. So, nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do."

"I wanted to do an album with the sounds of the '50s, the sounds of the '60s, of the '70s, and then have a sound of the future. And I said, "Wait a second. I know the synthesizer. Why don't I use the synthesizer which is the sound of the future?" And I didn't have any idea what to do but I knew I needed a click. So, we put a click on the 24-track which then was synced to the Moog modular. I knew that it could be a sound of the future but I didn't realize how much the impact would be. My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody calls me Giorgio."

"There is a game of love There is a game of love This is a game of love This is a game of love"

"Let the music in tonight Just turn on the music Let the music of your life Give life back to music"

"People are often afraid of things that sound new. Like robots."

"As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot."

"We tried to use these machines to express something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can. We were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology."

"I almost consider the character of the robots like a Marina Abramović performance art installation that lasted for 20 years"

"Electronic music right now is in its comfort zone, and it’s not moving one inch, That’s not what artists are supposed to do."

"We didn't decide to become robots, There was an accident in our studio. We were working on our sampler, and at exactly 9:09 a.m. on September 9, 1999, it exploded. When we regained consciousness, we discovered that we had become robots."

"The idea was really having this desire for live drums, as well as questioning, really, why and what is the magic in samples? Why for the last 20 years have producers and musicians been extracting these little snippets of audio from vinyl records? What kind of magic did it contain?"

"I hadn't heard of either disco or Meco. When I was asked to listen to Meco's now-famous recording, I was a little apprehensive, wondering how a pop record could be made from "The March from Star Wars" and what it would be like. I immediately liked what I heard and sensed that a geniune communication was taking place. Meco took things forward another step by bringing Star Wars to a vast audience who otherwise would not have heard it in its original symphonic setting. I am most grateful to Meco for all of this and I am delighted that 'disco' and 'Meco' are now household words."

"Disco is the best floor show in town. It's very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix."

"Disco is a major influence in the world of fashion. It is a dynamic factor in contemporary advertising. It is a message from every consumer that there has been a rediscovery of America's greatest by-product: fun."

"Hit the floor[,] babe[;] disco ain't dead, and neither am I!"

"Break-beat music and hip-hop culture were happening at the same time as the emergence of disco (in 1974 known as party music). Disco was also created by DJs in its initial phase, though these tended to be club jocks rather than mobile party jocks -- records by Barry White, Eddie Kendricks and others became dancefloor hits in New York clubs like Tamberlane and Sanctuary and were crossed over onto radio by Frankie Crocker at station WBLS. There were many parallels in the techniques used by Kool DJ Herc and a pioneering disco DJ like Francis Grasso, who worked at Sanctuary, as they used similar mixtures and superimpositions of drumbeats, rock music, funk and African records. For less creative disco DJs, however, the ideal was to slip-cute smoothly from the end of one record into the beginning of the next. They also created a context for breaks rather than foregrounding them, and the disco records which emerged out of the influence of this type of mixing tended to feature long introductions, anthemic choruses and extended vamp sections, all creating a tension which was released by the break. Break-beat music simply ate the cherry off the top of the cake and threw the rest away. In the words of DJ Grandmaster Flash:""

":'Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music. They would never play a record where only two minutes of the song was all it was worth. They wouldn't buy those types of records. The type of mixing that was out then was blending from one record to the next or waiting for the record to go off and wait for the jock to put the needle back on.'"

"Discos are little nirvanas where the solemn roar of rock music allows the son of Siddhartha to savor the little nothingness. To not be for a little while is all that is asked. Little ‘nothings’ that the life of today's individual needs in order to be reborn and live another week."

"Disco is here to stay."

"Disco is from hell, okay? And not the cool part of hell with all the murderers, but the lame ass part where the really bad accountants live."

"OFFSHOOTS OF THE SEMENESE PEOPLE INVENTED DISCO WHILE HAVING SEX UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF COCAINE. IT IS A SHAME UPON MY RACE - BUT WHAT IS DONE IS DONE."

"There where the air is free we'll be what we want to be Now if we make a stand we'll find our promised land"

"Will I get in your way or open your eyes? Who will give whom the bigger surprise? Young offender, how you resent The lovers you need; it hurts when they bleed..."

"But for all of those who don't fit in, Who follow their instincts and are told they sin, This is a prayer for a different way."

"Before we ever met I thought like everybody did You were just a moron, a billion-dollar kid You flew up all the way like a hawk chasing a dove I never thought that I would be a sacrifice in love"

"Remember when you were more easily led Behind the cricket pavillion and the bicycle shed Trembling as your dreams came true You looked up into those blue eyes and knew It was love, and now you can't pretend You've forgotten all the promises of that first friend... "Can you forgive her?" Consider for a minute who you are What you'd like to change, never mind the scars Bury the past, empty the shelf Decide it's time to reinvent yourself"

"Dreaming of the Queen Visiting for tea You and her and I and Lady Di The Queen said, I'm aghast Love never seems to last However hard you try And Di replied That there are no more lovers left alive..."

"The sunset is deeper and longer The scent of the jasmine is stronger Stray dogs don't bite, birds start to sing Lightning daren't strike, you suddenly bring Bluer skies..."